Friday, October 19, 2012

History, Fiction, and Historical Fiction (Part 1)

Hilary Mantel has won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker prize
for fiction, for her novel Bring Up the Bodies, a follow-up to her previous novel, Wolf Hall, which also won the Booker. This two-peat is remarkable
enough; but it’s even more remarkable when you consider that both novels are
historical fiction, which is sort of the halfwit second-cousin of traditional
fiction—the one you’re reluctant to let sit and the table because he chews with
his mouth open and laughs too loud—and even more remarkably, it’s
fiction about the Tudor court. There are a lot of historical novels about the reign of Henry VIII—a
virtual mudslide (in every sense of the word)—but the majority of them feature
covers with lushly clad royal ladies and gold-embossed lettering proclaiming
things like “Dusk for the Dawn Queen
by Callista Pilsen.” (I just made that up, so don’t go looking for it.) (Though
if you were tempted to go looking for it, stop reading now. This post is
not for you.) Mantel’s two books (a third is to follow) are a gust of cold,
clean air to anyone who’s ever tried to slog through any of that miasma of purple prose. Her
protagonist is not a royal wife, not Henry himself, but Henry’s impossibly gifted and painfully self-aware chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. And instead of
wallowing in the period, Mantel goes at it with a scalpel. I’d only read one
Mantel novel (Fludd) before
undertaking these two, and I wasn’t prepared for the searing brilliance of
them. The Booker committee got it right, and right twice, is all I’m sayin’.

I’m an avid reader of history, and as a novelist
I’m of course an avid reader of fiction; yet I don’t read much
historical fiction. But this
Booker win has got me thinking about the historical periods that most interest
me, and how I choose to spend my time there—whether in hard history and
biography, or in fiction—because there are a few historical novels that I’ve
discovered and cherished over the past three decades, and it’s time I gave them
a shout-out.

As long as we’re already on the subject, one my principal
historical interests is the British crown, from its first stirrings in the
reign of Wessex’s Alfred the Great right through to the tabloid present—but
especially the five hundred years between Henry II and Charles II (two of the
most complex and magnetic kings). And within that window, the hundred-year-plus
Tudor era remains the most consistently interesting to me. This is the tumultuous
period when a small feudal kingdom turned a corner, and for better and worse
(and there’s plenty of both) charged boldly towards modernity (shirking the
Church, breeding nationalism in its place, establishing a prototype police
state, etc.). And there was no shortage of collateral damage; in fact sometimes
I think I could happily spend the rest of my life reading only biographies of
people who had their heads cut off in Tudor times (Thomas More, Anne Boleyn,
Catherine Howard, Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex—and that’s
just a partial list.) But there’s no use denying that my obsession with the era
is principally due to the tremendous, larger-than-life, mesmerizing, maddening
presences of two monarchs: Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I. You’d
think they’d be a gift to novelists (they’ve certainly been so to playwrights
and screenwriters); yet good historical fiction about either is pretty much
nil—or was, until Mantel.

Even the traditional biographers tend to buckle under the weight
of so much muchness—and I’ve read a load
of Tudor biographies, believe me. There are a couple of writers—Alison Weir,
for one—who churn them out like cherry pies; it's a cottage
industry. But I find those books exhausting; that everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink
approach—you know what I mean. No, the Tudor biographies I most value, and to
which I return most frequently, are two short ones: Henry VIII: The
Mask of Royalty and Elizabeth
Tudor: Portrait of a Queen, both by Lacey
Baldwin Smith. He absolutely nails the psychology of both, and does so in very
pointed, plangent prose, worth reading for its own sake.

As for historical fiction about the English crown: as I
mentioned, it’s slim pickin’s unless you’re in the market for bodice-rippers.
But I can wholeheartedly recommend Rose Tremain’s Restoration, a wildly entertaining picaresque saga that features
one of my favorite kings, Charles II, in an indelible supporting role, where he
functions as something like a cross between a Greek chorus and a deus
ex machina. And talks like a 17th-century
Noël Coward.

And then, of course, there’s Mantel.

Right, I’ve chattered on long enough; next time I’ll talk
about a historical period that grips me even more than royal England does,
and which has been much, much luckier in its historical fiction—and in its
histories and biographies as well.